The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Moral Motivations and Physical Activity in Human Beings: Understanding a Spiritual Path

[ 1 ] Following up on what I said in my previous reflections on the tasks of the anthroposophical worldview in the present and for the development of humanity, I would like to add a few more points to our discussion today from a different perspective: those perspectives that arise when one sees how the development of 19th-century worldviews found, in a sense, a kind of descent into the absurd in Friedrich Nietzsche, and how the very phenomenon of Nietzsche serves to demonstrate that a view of the world and humanity such as that found in anthroposophy is a historical necessity for human development. I do not wish to repeat things I have already said here and elsewhere in the anthroposophical movement regarding Nietzsche, but rather I would like to point out two aspects of Nietzsche’s worldview today that I have touched upon even less.

[ 2 ] Throughout Nietzsche’s entire life, there runs a tendency to arrive at a view of the value and nature of morality in human beings. Nietzsche was, in the true sense of the word, a moral philosopher. He sought to come to terms with himself regarding the origin of morality, its significance for humanity, and the value of morality for the world order; and in this quest for clarity, we see how these two themes run through his entire life, which, in many other respects, underwent the most manifold transformations.

[ 3 ] The first is that throughout his entire life—one might say from the turning point he experienced as early as his second year of college until the end of his life—he held an essentially atheistic view. This atheistic element is what has run through all the transformations of Nietzsche’s worldview.

[ 4 ] And the second point is that, in the face of what he found peculiar in the moral impulses of the present—and what he also encountered in the intellectual and practical impulses of contemporary human life—he asserted a virtue as the most fundamental, and this virtue is integrity toward oneself, toward others, and toward the entire world order. Integrity and honesty—these are what he regarded as the most important things, what modern man needs above all else, both within his soul and outwardly toward the world.

[ 5 ] Nietzsche once listed four cardinal virtues that he considered the most significant for human life. Among these four cardinal virtues, integrity—honesty toward oneself and others—is the first. These four cardinal virtues are, namely: first, integrity toward oneself and one’s friends; second, courage toward one’s enemies; the third cardinal virtue is magnanimity toward those one has defeated; and the fourth cardinal virtue is courtesy toward all people.

[ 6 ] These four cardinal virtues, which Nietzsche described as particularly necessary for contemporary humanity, all tend toward the one he designated as the first—and which he regarded as a kind of necessary virtue of the times—they tend toward integrity, toward honesty. And one could say: There is a connection between this virtue of integrity and his atheism.

[ 7 ] Nietzsche had, at first, completely outgrown his era. He then outgrew that era in an even more comprehensive sense. Even a superficial examination reveals how he initially took root in Schopenhauer’s worldview—which is, after all, an atheistic one—and how, during the first period of his life, he saw this Schopenhauerian worldview artistically realized in Richard Wagner’s musical dramas.

[ 8 ] Nietzsche thus drew on Schopenhauer and Wagner. He then incorporated what might be called the positivism of the time in scientific life—that is, the worldview that conceives the entire structure of the world as based solely on what is immediately perceptible, on what is perceptible to the senses, and which therefore regards the sensually perceptible as the only thing relevant to the worldview.

[ 9 ] And Nietzsche then achieved a certain degree of independence in his third period by assimilating the modern concept of evolution, which he developed in such a way that he applied it to human beings, holding up as a kind of positivist ideal before the soul the notion that, in accordance with this evolutionary process, human beings must transition into the Übermensch.

[ 10 ] Thus, Nietzsche grew entirely out of the various intellectual and cultural currents of his time. But how did he grow out of them? The answer to this significant question also holds important insights into the character of the entire era spanning the last third of the 19th century. One must ask the question: Why did Nietzsche become an atheist? He actually became one out of integrity, out of inner honesty. He embraced—with complete honesty—the knowledge that the 19th century could offer him, and what he could absorb with sacred zeal from this knowledge of the 19th century. And he told himself, in accordance with his innermost feelings: If I honestly embrace this particular way of knowing characteristic of the 19th century, then it leads me nowhere toward the divine; therefore, I must exclude the divine from my world of thought.

[ 11 ] For therein lies the first major conflict between Nietzsche and his era, so that he was bound to become a fighter against his time. When Nietzsche looked around at the people who had also embraced the insights of the 19th century, he saw that the vast majority of them were, at the same time, believers in a divine world order. He perceived this as dishonesty. It seemed insincere to him to view the world, on the one hand, as 19th-century thought did, and yet still to accept the existence of the divine in some way. Indeed, because he was still speaking in the various conceptual frameworks of the nineteenth century, he did not actually articulate what he instinctively felt regarding the worldview of the nineteenth century. He felt that the nineteenth century viewed worldly phenomena in the same way one views the human organism when it lies as a corpse, after it has died. If, so to speak, one believes in this human organism in death—if one believes that this dead organism possesses an inner truth—then, in all honesty, one could not truly believe that this organism has any meaning unless it is permeated by the living, soul-filled, and spirit-filled human being. Anyone who studies a corpse should actually say to themselves: What I am looking at, what I can study, has no truth. It has truth only when it is permeated by the spiritual human being. It presupposes the spiritual human being. But that person is no longer there when I have the corpse before me.

[ 12 ] Nietzsche felt this quite clearly, even though he did not express it so explicitly: If one views nature as modern scientific understanding views it, one views it as a corpse. One should actually say to oneself: That which one interprets as nature around oneself no longer possesses the divine within it. But if one accepts it in its absoluteness, if one speaks of this nature in such a way that one merely follows its laws, then one must obviously deny that anything divine underlies it. For just as this nature stands before one, there is no more of the divine underlying it than there is of the human underlying a human corpse.

[ 13 ] Such, for example, were the feelings that lived within Nietzsche’s soul. But the worldview of the 19th century had such a powerful effect on him that he said to himself: Yes, we have nothing before us but this nature, and modern times have taught us to have nothing else before us. If we adhere to this understanding of nature, then we must reject God.

[ 14 ] And so, as a student of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche rejected everything divine, viewing it as a form of dishonesty to possess modern knowledge and yet still speak of the divine. In this regard, his inner life was extraordinarily interesting, precisely because it strove for such intense integrity. He perceived it as a cultural lie of the 19th century that, on the one hand, people held a view of nature as it actually was, while on the other hand they still spoke of the divine. But he also took life within this natural order—in which people still believed—seriously. And he saw that the life of modern man had, in fact, developed in such a way that it had become entirely natural for him to accept such a natural order. Nature had not, after all, forced modern man to accept this order; rather, life had become such that it could tolerate only this view of nature. The view of nature actually arose from life itself. And Nietzsche found this very life to be thoroughly dishonest. And he strove for honesty.

[ 15 ] He had to tell himself: If we live in a social order such as modern humanity recognizes as the true one, then we can never feel like human beings within this truth. — That was, in fact, the fundamental feeling during the first period of his life: How can I feel like a human being when I am surrounded by this natural order, as it is now viewed? That which is truth prevents me from attaining my consciousness as a human being! — This is how Nietzsche felt and perceived things; that is why he told himself during this first period of his life: If one cannot live in truth, then one must live in illusion, in poetry, in art.

[ 16 ] And when he turned his gaze to Greek culture, he believed he had recognized in the Greeks precisely the people who, out of a certain naivety, would have arrived at this dissatisfaction with truth, and who would therefore have consoled themselves with appearance, with beauty. He expressed this in his first work, *The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music*, written in such a beautifully hymnal style. He meant to say, in essence: Man, if you are in the realm of truth, you can never feel yourself to be human. So flee from the realm of truth into that realm where you create for yourself a world that does not correspond to truth. In this world of fiction, you will find solace for what truth can never give you.

[ 17 ] The Greeks, he believed, as true, naive pessimists, felt that one could not find satisfaction within the world of truth. That is why, above all else, they created their marvelous tragedies—a world of beautiful appearances—so that within this world they might have that which can satisfy human beings.

[ 18 ] In Richard Wagner’s musical drama, Nietzsche believed he saw a renewal of this beautiful illusion, with the express aim of leading one away from the so-called real world into the world of illusion, in order to find fulfillment as a human being. For Nietzsche, therefore, there was no possibility of saying to himself: Let us take the sensory world, let us delve deeper into our contemplation of the sensory world, let us penetrate from the outer manifestation to the inner divine; in this way, we will feel connected to this divine as human beings and come to truly feel at home in the world as human beings.

[ 19 ] For Nietzsche, this line of reasoning could not exist. He saw no possibility—precisely because he wanted to be honest—of arriving at such a conclusion based solely on what the 19th century was. Hence the alternative: This entire reality gives us no satisfaction, so we find satisfaction in an unreal world. It is somewhat like if there were beings somewhere who arrived on a planet where they found only corpses, and who, faced with these corpses, had to see not remnants of the real but true reality—because they do not see the souls that once floated through these corpses, and as if these beings, having thus encountered a planet filled with corpses, were to invent beings that animate these corpses in order to console themselves over them. That was Nietzsche’s first perception of the world.

[ 20 ] And essentially, the writings that followed *The Birth of Tragedy* were: “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer,” “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” “Schopenhauer as Educator,” “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”—confrontations between his integrity and the dishonesty of the age. This age spoke of the spirit, even though it had no path whatsoever from sensuality to the spirit; this age spoke of the divine, even though, fundamentally speaking, it could incorporate nothing divine into its understanding. This age spoke something like this: In the past, people gave themselves over to the delusion of the divine, yet we know from the study of nature that there is no such thing as the divine—but we do have our concerts, after all, in which we make music. — There is, in fact, a chapter in David Friedrich Strauss’s *The Old and the New Faith* that particularly annoyed Nietzsche, in which David Friedrich Strauss himself asserts this philistine standpoint. That is why Nietzsche wrote this essay on Strauss as a philistine and writer—directed against a relatively outstanding man like David Friedrich Strauss—precisely to show how one is either dishonest by still assuming the existence of a divine reality that one should no longer accept, or else must fall into the banal and philistine, as he saw in David Friedrich Strauss.

[ 21 ] But now came the second period in Nietzsche’s life. He remained true to himself with regard to the demand for honesty; he remained true to himself with regard to his atheism. But in the first period, he adopted ideals—albeit ones tinged with aesthetics—that were nonetheless legitimate, ideals with which people could console themselves against the reality of the external senses.

[ 22 ] But now, I would say, in the second period of his life, his spirit clings more strongly to what, according to contemporary opinion, the world reveals to human beings and to them alone. And so he said to himself: No matter how much a person may devote himself to ideals, these ideals are, after all, born of his physical nature! People delude themselves with many beautiful things, but this ideal beauty is, after all, only all-too-human.

[ 23 ] And so the time came for him when he saw, in particular, human weakness—the all-too-human—and man’s devotion to his physical nature. And since he took the view of nature seriously, he said to himself: Man simply cannot help but devote himself to his physical nature! — Nietzsche once said: “Long live physics; even longer live integrity in the belief in physics.” “Let us be honest,” he told himself during the second period of his life, “let us be clear: no matter how beautiful a person’s idealistic thought may be, it is still an emanation of their physical nature.” Let us therefore approach human life; let us not describe the smoke it produces at the top, but rather describe, at the bottom, the fuels from which this smoke is formed: then we will not arrive at the idealistic-divine, but rather at the human—all-too-human.

[ 24 ] And so, during the second period of his life, Nietzsche—precisely because he wanted to be honest with himself and others—effectively destroyed everything idealistic in life. He told himself: What people usually call the soul is actually nothing but a lie. Underlying this is the constitution of the body, and something that arises from this constitution of the body reveals itself in such a way that we give it the name “soul.”

[ 25 ] And Nietzsche saw in this inclination of certain modern individuals—toward Voltaire, for example—the true Enlightenment, that true Enlightenment which consists in man no longer engaging with some illusory world in order to rise above reality, but rather in his viewing reality directly in its physical nature and seeing everything moral emerge from the physical.

[ 26 ] And when one then looks at the third period of Nietzsche’s life, one cannot help but notice how he—one might say—driven by a highly pathological nature, pushed this integrity to the point of excess, as he said: If one takes seriously and honestly what one can know about nature and the laws of nature in the modern sense, then one must say: Everything that is supposed to live as spirit within the human being is simply the emanation of his physical being. Therefore, the only person who can be perfect is the one whose physical nature stands out as the most perfect in comparison to others; that is, the one whose physical nature is such that the strongest instincts live within him.

[ 27 ] Nietzsche ultimately viewed instinctive life, as opposed to all mental and spiritual life, as that which, in the course of evolution, leads human beings beyond themselves, as instincts grow ever stronger; they remain instincts, but increasingly transcend the animal realm: thus, human beings are transformed into the Übermensch.

[ 28 ] What was it, then, that actually drove Nietzsche forward in this way—so that he first recognized the ideal as seemingly necessary for humanity, then, as he put it, “put this ideal on ice” because he saw how it springs from the physical, and finally sought to lead humanity toward the Übermensch through a higher development of its physical nature and instinctive life? It was the impossibility, when one stood within the worldview of the 19th century, of grasping the physical in the sense of that worldview and then still breaking free from it if one wished to remain honest. One simply had to stay within it.

[ 29 ] And Nietzsche developed, if one may put it that way, an iron integrity that led him to throw himself, with everything he had, into the physical realm. So that, in fact, his ideal for the future—if one may still speak of an “ideal” here—for human civilization must have consisted in humanity becoming enlightened about the great illusion of possessing a spirit. The reason these underlying themes are usually not seen in Nietzsche—who, however, worked his way out of them as honestly as possible—is simply that he denied the spirit with such great spirit, that he glorified humanity’s spiritual poverty in such a dazzling, brilliant, and witty manner.

[ 30 ] It simply becomes impossible to be a moral philosopher—as Nietzsche had become by his very nature within the worldview of the 19th century—if one is to take that worldview seriously. For if one is no longer able to speak of it as humanity’s task on earth to bring something spiritual and otherworldly into this earthly world—if one feels compelled to remain within the mere earthly world—then, if one wishes to establish morality, one does so without justification. Morality becomes outlawed if one accepts the 19th-century worldview in all sincerity. And Nietzsche truly experienced this deep within himself—that morality had become outlawed. He wanted to be a moral philosopher. But where to draw the impulses for morality? That was the great question for him. If one finds within human beings the radiance of a supernatural realm, then morality emerges as a demand of this supernatural realm upon the sensible world; then morality is possible. If one finds no supernatural realm within human beings—as was the case with the 19th-century worldview—then there is nowhere to draw the impulses for morality from. If one wishes to distinguish between good and evil, one needs the supernatural. But for Nietzsche, who took the 19th-century worldview seriously, the supernatural had to be rejected. And so he groped his way through human life in order to find, after all, something like the origin of moral impulses.

[ 31 ] Thus, looking at the cultural development of humanity, he observed how members of the stronger race acted as conquerors toward weaker people, how these stronger members of the race imposed their course of action on the weaker ones, and how, driven by their instinctive nature, they demanded of those they had confronted as conquerors: “You must do this and that!” — After all, Nietzsche could not believe in any categorical imperative or moral precepts. He could only believe in the instinctive members of the master race, who regarded themselves as the good ones and the others as the bad ones—that is, as inferior human beings upon whom they imposed the direction of their actions.

[ 32 ] And then it came to pass that those whom the conquerors regarded as inferior joined forces, so to speak, and—now not with the more brutal methods of the past, but with the more subtle means of the soul and spirit, through cunning and cleverness—became conquerors over the others. And those who had previously designated themselves as the superior ones, as the good ones, called them the bad ones, because they were conquerors, power-hungry people, strong-willed people, militaristic people; they called them the evil ones. And they called themselves—who had previously been called the inferior ones, the bad ones—the good ones. To be poor, to be limited, to be oppressed, to be weak, to be overcome, and yet to hold fast in that weakness and in that being overcome—that is the good. And to be a conqueror, to overcome others—that is the evil.

[ 33 ] Thus, Good and Evil arose from Good and Bad. But Good and Bad did not yet carry the moral connotations they would later acquire; rather, they merely reflected the distinction between conquerors, the powerful, and the nobility on one side, and the army of slaves—who were the inferior ones, the “bad” ones—on the other. And what was later distinguished between the good and the evil stemmed solely from the slave revolt of those who had previously been the “bad” and the “inferior”—who now called the others “criminals” and “evil”—out of revenge for what had befallen them. Thus, to Nietzsche, the later morality clothed in the concepts of “good” and “evil” appeared as the revenge that the oppressed took on the oppressors. But he found no inner justification for morality anywhere. He could only position himself beyond good and evil, not within good and evil. For to find an inner justification for good and evil, he would have had to resort to the supernatural. But to him, that was a delusion, merely the expression of weak human nature, which refused to admit that its true essence is exhausted in the physical world.

[ 34 ] If one were to characterize Nietzsche, one would simply say: Actually, all thinking people of his time should have spoken as he did, had they been as honest as he was. And he made it his goal to be completely honest. That is why he became a fighter against his time, and that is why he wielded such sharp intellectual weapons, and why he strove for a revaluation of all values. He saw the values under which he lived as having been shaped by insincerity. Centuries had already been at work bringing forth modern scientific concepts and introducing them into all of history. But those same centuries had left behind in the human soul that which was no longer compatible with them: divine and moral concepts. From these had emerged values that must now be reevaluated.

[ 35 ] Nietzsche’s life is an immense tragedy. And I do not believe that anyone can truly grasp the essence of human civilization in the last third of the 19th century—and how it continued to exert its influence into the 20th century—without having even glimpsed the kind of tragedy that unfolded in a soul that lived through this civilization, such as Nietzsche’s. It is truly the case that we must regard all the collapse we are now experiencing as a consequence of what Nietzsche calls the dishonesty of modern civilization. One might say that Nietzsche became a fighter against his time precisely because, driven by his intuition, he had to conclude: If this dishonesty persists, then only a destructive struggle can take hold among the peoples who belong to this modern civilization. And this tragedy in Nietzsche’s life arose precisely from the fact that Nietzsche wanted to find the foundations of morality but could not find them within the intellectual climate of his time. Nowhere did he find a source from which he could draw moral inspiration. And so he groped his way forward, cutting his fingers everywhere as he felt his way. And out of that pain, he described his era exactly as he has just described it.

[ 36 ] What was he looking for? He was looking for something that can only be found in the supersensible realm, something that cannot be found in the realm of the sensible. That is what he was seeking. For, no matter how beautiful, grand, or noble the moral principles you might conceive of, you cannot use them to heat a machine, turn a wheel, or set an electrical device in motion. But if, in one’s understanding, one applies only that which sets the machine in motion, sets the electrical device in motion, turns the wheel—if one incorporates only that into one’s understanding—then one can never understand how that which lives within the human being as a moral impulse is supposed to take hold within one’s own human organism. One can conceive of the loftiest ideals: they can be nothing but smoke and fog, for there is no way they could take effect anywhere—in a muscle, in any dexterity, or the like. There is nothing in the sensory world where one can see moral ideals taking effect in the organic realm. Imagine the most beautiful moral ideals—Nietzsche could only say to himself—if you cherish them in your mind, you are to your own organism as you are to a machine. You can make posters for the machine, writing “Moral Ideals” on them: it won’t be fueled by them; it won’t turn. But should you turn, if you are as natural science tells you, should you turn according to what your moral ideals are? You can conceive of them; they may be very beautiful, but they cannot intervene in the workings of the world anywhere! Therefore, they are a lie in the face of reality. It is not the person who devotes himself to ideals who is effective, but the one who fuels his machine so that the instincts become powerful: “the blond beast,” as Nietzsche puts it paradigmatically.

[ 37 ] And so Nietzsche, with his problems, stood before the human being, who could only have been moral to him if the moral impulses within him had found a point of entry. They did not. Hence, not good and evil, but “Beyond Good and Evil.”

[ 38 ] But now consider this: We have always had to characterize this entire modern understanding of the world by saying that it does not reach human beings; it cannot gain any insight into or conception of the human being. Thus, one does not have the human being when one experiences him in one’s soul in the sense of the modern worldview. Nevertheless, in Nietzsche everything tended toward the human being. Everything tended toward something he could not possess! And now, entirely in keeping with the modern concept of evolution, he wanted to transform the human being into the Übermensch—only he did not have the human being. How, then, could one demonstrate, using something one did not even possess, how it transitions into the Übermensch! Man was not there for perception, for sensation, for feeling, for the impulses of the will. Only now was the Übermensch! It was as if, speaking merely out of old habit, one had formed these words: “man” and “Übermensch”—and now one was suffocating, because these words have no content, just as one suffocates in a vacuum.

[ 39 ] Nietzsche was faced with the necessity of entering the supernatural world with his moral problems, and was unable to do so. That was his inner tragedy. And in this, he is at the same time the representative soul of the late 19th century—that representative soul which points to the necessity: If you wish to remain true to yourselves as human beings, you must enter the supernatural world so as not to declare the ideals of morality to be a lie.

[ 40 ] Nietzsche goes mad because he is faced with the immediate necessity of entering the supernatural world and is unable to do so. Many other people do not go mad; but I do not wish to go into the reasons why they do not, for even when describing the peculiarities of civilization, one must observe certain bounds of politeness. But one thing emerges from Nietzsche’s life: Modern man can be honest and upright toward himself and others only if he enters the supersensible world. In other words: Honesty and uprightness do not exist in a non-supersensible worldview. Nor can one find the path from man to the Übermensch unless one can take the other path—from the sensible to the supersensible. And if morality belongs, in a certain sense, to the Übermensch, then it demands that this Übermensch be sought not in the sensible but in the supersensible; otherwise, it is merely a word—the word “Übermensch”—that is cried out, but to which nothing echoes from the world.

[ 41 ] Tomorrow I intend to examine the topic from the other side—namely, how what Nietzsche encountered must now be further developed so that moral values can be properly understood in human life and brought into harmony with the insights of our time.

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[ 42 ] on the “Schneider problem” of the Anthroposophical Society

[ 43 ] Tomorrow I intend to approach this topic from a different angle—namely, how we must now carry forward what Nietzsche discovered, so that morality can be properly understood in human life and brought into harmony with the insights of our time. These are precisely the kinds of questions that members of the Anthroposophical Society must ask themselves. Having a sense of and understanding for such questions is part of what it means to belong to the Anthroposophical Society. And the Society is now in the very process of coming to a deeper self-reflection.

[ 44 ] I would like to add that a meeting of delegates will take place in Stuttgart at the end of February—if travel conditions permit by then—at which the fate of the German Anthroposophical Society will first be discussed, so that the conditions for the Anthroposophical Society’s existence can then be addressed in a broader context. These matters must be taken very seriously today. For it was precisely during my stay in Stuttgart that I truly sensed how those who wish to take action within the Anthroposophical Society must, above all, bear in mind that Anthroposophy, in the three stages I recently described to you here, has become something that has outgrown what the Anthroposophical Society in many respects wishes to remain.

[ 45 ] In the early stages of the Anthroposophical Society’s development, no thought was given to how, later on—under the influence of the Goetheanum and other factors—people in the widest circles would come to engage with anthroposophy, both as opponents and as supporters. The Society must grow along with the growth of anthroposophy. And so the next problem—which is to occupy the minds of the Anthroposophical Society in Stuttgart at the end of February—forgive me, my dear friends, if I put this in figurative terms—the next problem is a tailor’s problem. It is, in fact, the problem raised by the fact that anthroposophy today is something for which the Anthroposophical Society represents garments that anthroposophy has outgrown. The sleeves of the jacket no longer reach the hands, not even the elbows, not to mention the trousers. Now this tailoring problem must truly be solved with the full engagement of the spirit: How can we make the right garments for anthroposophy out of the Anthroposophical Society? That will be the major challenge for Stuttgart at the end of February. And this is, after all, alluded to in part in the call that has now been sent out.

[ 46 ] What has particularly struck me just now is, specifically, that there is not enough of what I alluded to at the end of my last lecture here last week. I said: Certainly, not every single person can become a physician in the anthroposophical sense, but there can be understanding for what arises from anthroposophy and has a fruitful effect on medicine in the broadest sense; there can be understanding, there can be interest. This interest must exist among the broadest circle of members of the Anthroposophical Society for everything that takes place within anthroposophy. Then we will also succeed in solving the Schneider problem. But it must be solved; otherwise, we will simply have to consider other means; for our opponents are full of interest and are extraordinarily attentive to everything, and their methods consist, in particular, in being effective disseminators of the anthroposophical worldview. Oh, if only the members of the Anthroposophical Society were as effective at spreading the anthroposophical worldview as our opponents are, then things would go splendidly!

[ 47 ] Opponents take all sorts of things out of context from the writings, interpret them in the most absurd ways, and spread these interpretations with frenzied enthusiasm. As a result, anthroposophy is very well known—but as a caricature—among its opponents. Until now, there has been no equivalent effort to present the true nature of anthroposophy. That is indeed the case. But this is precisely what has now become a crisis and what absolutely must be resolved. For the time ahead, we need a strong—not a weak—Anthroposophical Society.

[ 48 ] I recently provided you with the names of the provisional committee that will manage affairs within Germany for the time being, until the Assembly of Delegates takes place. The last time we were in Stuttgart, several prominent figures agreed to speak at the Assembly of Delegates, thereby inspiring hope among those who care deeply about the Anthroposophical Society that the power of anthroposophy will be presented to the world in a truly compelling way across a wide range of fields. But the speakers who have agreed to participate will truly have to muster all their strength and stir up all their enthusiasm so that they can fulfill their tasks. We shall see!